


Trying to light up the dark

by jarofactonbell



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: M/M, angsty metaphors, felix is beautiful and all the felix stans in my group chat spoke through me when i wrote this, i solemnly swear that i am up to all trash, lost stars lyrics, one thousand percent self indulgent, self projection intensifies, trying to find out the meaning of life and it is not 42
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-06
Updated: 2018-07-06
Packaged: 2019-06-06 05:54:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,718
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15188267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jarofactonbell/pseuds/jarofactonbell
Summary: Woojin wants to escape for a while, run from the inevitably of his life. Felix is the gold shine in the pitch dark of the night. Together they are stars, lost, but lighting up the dark where they are





	Trying to light up the dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dearfelix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearfelix/gifts).



> I did it, I wrote the woolix, it is a short thing, but I did it, out of love for condu. I love woolix they're such a soft and comforting ship come cry about 'em with me ToT 
> 
> featuring me listening to Lost Stars on repeat and going 'fuck it, i'm writing a fic'
> 
> So here we are
> 
> I remembered being more fluent in note writing but apparently not
> 
> Also Cindy, grandmother, tofu supremacist, this is for you, I'm writing more for you, I love you and appreciate you a lot, knock those interviews on their asses, you got this, happy late birthday xx

Woojin hardly ever sneaks out. Others assume he’s content, alright where he is. No visible woe is no woe. Friends are not equipped in mind reading abilities. Woojin does not want to bother his friends. Thus the woe builds, with his mind insisting that there is no woe and he should be careful lest he allows this delusion to turn into reality.

 

Sneaking out by himself is easy. Sneaking out with a guitar is harder, with no accomplice to hand him the guitar from the window of his dorm.

 

The bus driver doesn’t ask him questions when he steps onto the vehicle. Souls who wander between midnight and 2am all have reasons and places they can’t reach, lost within the occasional headlights of cars and bright street lights overhead.  The guitar sits between his legs and he watches as stops speed by, the stars hidden by skyscrapers and the night sky a sort of luminous, artificial bright black - it shouldn’t be so, but the sky is glowing, at 1am, where it shouldn’t be. He cranes his neck to peer out, window fogging up.

 

He gets off at the stop near the Han. Walks half on the grass and on the pavement. The hubbub of the city hangs at the outskirts of the park encasing the river, but it’s quieter. Calmer. Like time had slowed down and he can catch his breath again.

 

It’s been a while since he sees the outside world - the sky from the university is polluted with light and smoke rings from those who want to burn the roofs of their mouth with bitter ash, to curb the hunger from their tongues, that they inhale fires inside their lungs and grind dirt between their molars, so that everything taste like fire and mud when  they consume.

 

In Woojin’s dream, the sky is free from all this enveloping smoke, the smoke that stems from a hatred of oneself, and all the light that he can see is the self-projecting gold shine, the light of those who are lost and are stars on earth.

 

He is thinking in dreams and lyrics, trade in music and fantasies. Sitting by the grass overlooking the liquid black stuff of the river, he wonders if he can plant his roots here and never come back to the polluted and suffocating dorm rooms, of four walls that he can’t breathe in and of walls that trap unravelling minds inside stacked bricks, holding them down under the smog.

 

He is just playing whatever now, hoping his tears can make him drunk on the inexplicable unease and blossoming sorrow. He is not trying to light up the dark. He is simply drowning in his tears, drinking the sorrow and getting less sober on the boundlessness of woe.

 

He is so old. He is not youthful, yet he is young. The chords ring twice over, dissonant the first time, coming together the second.

 

_Please don't see just a boy caught up in dreams and fantasies_

 

But really, why is he granted youth. It is wasted on him. Why is the thing that makes others want to live, youthfulness, be reserved for older ages? Why must it be on him who is young to live the life he has now and nothing more after youth had passed?

 

_God, tell us the reason youth is wasted on the young_

_It's hunting season and the lambs are on the run_

_Searching for meaning_

 

He is not gold. He gives out no light. Death at his core, he is simply a lump of melted down wastes, pulled and thrown about in orbits not of his own. He has nowhere to go and no place to come on. He is simply a collection of what once was a star, dragging along in unseen ellipticals around a greater force that will subsume him.

 

He feels oddly like the lamb cornered by the hunters during hunting season. A sentient lamb, one that realises his doom is near and he supplicates before his predator, to beg for mercy, searching for meaning in an inevitability. There is no escaping death - one only has a choice in how they die. Woojin bargains and begs with his hunter, for an extension, in futility. He dwells in the realm of his own tears, drunken on the excess of sorrow too much, shoulder-deep now, denying the reality that his life is to end and there is only acceptance and denial on his part. Nothing more.

 

_But are we all lost stars, trying to light up the dark?_

  


“You’re really just singing lyrics out of context,” he jolts, fingernails scraping across strings with a screech of disharmony. He lets go of the neck, swivels about to find if the voice belongs to who he thinks it belongs to.

 

Felix, in outrageous shorts and a black muscle tee, grins at him, all teeth, freckles like droplets of gemstones across his face, like opals bloom on his cheeks and the ridge of his nose and under the bags of his eyes, like he is of the earth and all the living things prospering on it.

 

“Hey,” the boy with gems on his face, “how ya doing?”

 

Felix gazes on at him, eyes searching for something beyond Woojin and the skin he sits in. It is all sorts of unravelling and coming back together and he hashes out stuttered breaths, swallowing too many shed tears in his own pit of wallowing self-pity.

 

“Can’t sleep,” Woojin flicks a guitar string with his nail, the extent of what he wants to convey remains vastly unspoken and unable to phrase with mere words.“I’ve resorted to strumming Levine on my guitar.”

 

“Interesting coping techniques,” Felix drops to the grass, hair no longer nicely styled, sweat pouring from his scalp along his temples. He pulls out a handkerchief and presses it on the side of the boy’s head, hair like sunlit gold, gold on gold, warmth on warmth. “It’s also very late.”

 

Woojin shrugs, negating the distance between them, dragging his guitar with him, placing the entirety of the wooded instrument across his crossed legs and Felix’s knees. It binds them together. The younger boy smiles, teeth hidden behind his lips now, eyes all half shut, half open, smaller hand encasing Woojin and his handkerchief.

 

“Me too. I couldn’t sleep as well. Figured running would take away all the,” Felix blinks, tongue dabbing at his upper lips, an irregular triangle peeking in reddish pink under sparsely lit Seoul, here one moment and gone the next, his lids twitching, grappling with language and words, “stress away.”

 

Woojin nods. He couldn’t remain stationary, rooted under that suffocating pollution too. If he had tasted the air before he left, he would’ve been inundated with the collapse of many. The best solution was to get away. Just for one night. Remove himself, undo his roots, settle temporarily on a foreign ground. Nurse himself back to full health and return.

 

Felix hums that little phrase, the nomadic refrain as they both endearingly term it. Felix who moves from place to place, but returns to Woojin’s side. It’s their little promise, their little secret.

 

_Come let’s take my hand and see where we end up tomorrow_

_Best laid plans are sometimes just one night stands_

 

“Sing the second verse,” the boy who glows bright gold hums, vibrating warmth even under desolate, starless night. “Try and really understand the lyrics. They’re beautiful.”

 

Woojin retracts his hand away from Felix’s hold, picking up his guitar by the neck. Strums. Trying to recall the rest of the short song. Something optimistic. Something uncertain. His fingers remember the chord progression, but not the words. Somehow his mind blocks out the rest of Lost Stars beyond the first verse and the bridge.

 

Felix leans forward, hums, and sings it for him.

 

_Who are we? Just a speck of dust within the galaxy?_

_Woe is me, if we're not careful turns into reality_

_Don't you dare let our best memories bring you sorrow_

_Yesterday I saw a lion kiss a deer_

_Turn the page maybe we'll find a brand new ending_

_Where we're dancing in our tears_

 

Woojin strums, in quiet bewilderment, as the timbre of Felix’s natural tongue flows. His voice is music itself, rumbling through the notes ringing in harmony. Something draws him to Levine especially. Because Lost Stars is all about the inevitability of everything, but the lamb, the deer, the prey - accepts its end in the ending of the song, choosing to die painlessly. The goddamn song just talks about being lost, faithless, in this lawless world, and at some point one should just tell the universe to fuck off and burn themselves in living, so that there is ultimately meaning in meaninglessness.

 

“Got it?” Felix whispers, the words coming from the depths of his throat. How can one guy’s voice dip so low?

 

He shrugs. He wants to stay out for longer, catch the light of the lost stars.

 

“When you’re ready, I’ll give you a hand up,” Felix leans back, tips his head to the night sky too, both of them looking at the same sky.

 

“Thanks, Lix,” he puts a hand on top of Felix’s, completely swallowing that petite appendage whole.

 

“I shine for you, hyung,” Felix whispers into the back of his hand in front of his dorm window, sunrise tingeing the clouds with red hot lava and deep ocean blue. “You’re not the dark. You’re simply lost.”

 

“And I suppose that makes you my compass?”

 

“That makes me your guide, be it heart or light. I’ll shine when you shine.”

 

Orange light drips from the top of his head to his nose. Felix’s smile envelops his fingertips and his ears in a sort of scorching heat, warmer than the sun.

 

“And you’re shining now. You’re very bright, hyung, lost or not. And you do light up the dark.”

 

“I suppose I am.”

 

Felix’s laugh takes away all the bitterness of living. He supposes the best light does that, even to the wretched. Mends them and patches them back to completion. He’s dancing with the hunters now, kissing the lion on the lips. The sun reaches its peak. He tears off that page in his notebook, starts another.  

 

_But are we all lost stars, trying to light up the dark?_

 

**Author's Note:**

> Do feel free to scream at me anywhere I probably deserve it this is pure, chaotic unediting (?)
> 
>    
> [I am available here (Twitter)](https://twitter.com/jarofactonbell)  
> [please feed a hungry child](https://ko-fi.com/jarofactonbell)  
> [I am also available here (Curious Cat)](https://curiouscat.me/jenny_benny)


End file.
